When the word came in last night that Barack Obama and the Democrats had won national elections in something close to a landslide, millions of Americans went to bed, satisfied that even if their candidate didn’t win, democracy had survived. The lopsided results made it clear that this election had in no way been stolen.
But not so at Ole Miss, which last month marked the 50th anniversary of deadly segregationist riots. Shortly after midnight, several hundred mostly white students protested furiously, reportedly yelling anti-black racial slurs and throwing rocks at passing cars. An Obama/Biden campaign sign was burned before campus police broke up the crowd in Oxford. There were apparently no arrests or injuries.
The reaction to the re-election of our first black president from the radical right — and that seemed clearly to include some University of Mississippi students — ranged from sputtering rage and name-calling to calls for a new Southern secession, mass emigration to Europe, or even the break-up of the United States. There was one thing large numbers seemed clearly to agree on: The changing racial demographics of our country, expected to lose its white majority by 2050, was key to the result.
“Welcome to a truly white minority world,” wrote one commenter on Stormfront, the world’s largest white supremacist Web forum, which is run by a former Alabama Klan leader. “The future is now. There is no denying this. The sun has set on humanity’s greatest era: 1500-2000. … [T]he only way to survive this war of annihilation is separatism. … [W]e have to choose regions or states.”
“The loss of a white majority in the United States has helped drive a truly explosive growth of the radical right in the last three years, and that now seems likely to accelerate,” the report goes on. “Hate groups in recent years have risen to more than 1,000, and the number of antigovernment ‘Patriot’ groups has shot up from just 149 in 2008 to 1,274, according to research by the Southern Poverty Law Center. For months now, groups on the radical right have increasingly fretted about a possible Obama victory. Now that that has occurred, the radical right may grow more dangerous still.”
The last time someone pointed out that white supremacists are bad news, the rightwing blogosphere lost their shit and played a blizzard of lily-white victim cards. They all claimed to be rightwing extremists, because aligning themselves with radical racists allowed them to claim to be victims of a government smear job.
Of course, for many, it wasn’t much of a shift.
“Non-Islamic domestic terrorism in the United States shot up in the wake of President Obama’s first election in 2008, spurred by fury over the ‘socialist’ president and the racial change that he represents in the American population,” the report tells us. “Now, given the reaction from the radical right to [Tuesday’s] election results, that seems likely to continue — or to get even worse, as racists and right-wing radicals seethe.”
But we should totally ignore all that, so that whining rightwing nutjobs don’t get their diapers in a bunch.
